transitivity of "expire" (fwd)

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Wed Feb 27 01:28:40 UTC 2002


At 5:43 PM -0500 2/26/02, Mark A Mandel wrote:
>On Tue, 26 Feb 2002, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>#At 9:26 PM -0700 2/25/02, Rudolph C Troike wrote:
>#>I forwarded the preceding too soon -- here's the answer for the passive!
>#
>#Amazing!  The language keeps changing under our very eyes and ears.
>#Whodathunkit?  I wonder if this involves a reanalysis of the common
>#participial adjective ("driving with an expired license", etc.) as a
>#passive rather than perfect form, which allows it to be reconstructed
>#as "X has been expired" rather than "X has expired"?  Curiously, the
>#only relevant (transitive) "expire" the OED lists is obsolete--
>
>I've actually wondered about that usage ("driving with an expired
>license"), since the perfect participle is normally passive in English.
>How common and productive is this usage? Is it found mostly in fixed
>expressions like that?
>
It's not particularly uncommon.  Joan Bresnan had a long paper on
them back in '82 or thenabouts, citing examples like "fallen leaves",
"well-travelled man", "well-read woman", "undescended testicle", etc.
I don't have the article on me, but there were a number of other
examples.

larry



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